


now i lay me down to sleep (i pray the lord my soul to keep)

by TheJGatsby



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, very very sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 19:25:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3866944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheJGatsby/pseuds/TheJGatsby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been a long time since Clarke left Camp Jaha before Bellamy finally heard news of her. ... It was then that he felt the universe come crashing down around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now i lay me down to sleep (i pray the lord my soul to keep)

 

_Now I lay me down to sleep_

_I pray the Lord my soul to keep_

It had been a long time since Clarke walked away from Camp Jaha before Bellamy finally heard news of her.

(Three months one week five days twentyish hours to be precise not that he was counting not that he remembered not that he cared enough to count to remember to memorize to miss)

(He did).

A hunting patrol trudged into camp looking grim carrying something heavy between them covered in a sheet and Bellamy saw but he didn’t assume. He thought it was a dead grounder, a lost member of the patrol, someone else to bury and mourn and pretend they wouldn’t forget.

It wasn’t until one of them came and fetched him and told him that he felt the entire universe collapse. It had been swaying on its foundation for three months one week five days and twentyish hours but he was a stubborn guy and refused to acknowledge that the damn place was any minute from coming down around him but it was the universe so he trusted that it’d stay intact, you know? He was wrong. He was wrong.

“We found Clarke.” The kid’s voice was so grim and Bellamy was so confused because knowing that Clarke was back made him so happy and why wasn’t this kid happy too? Weird. Too weird. “We found her body, about a mile from camp. Doesn’t look like she’s been dead long, maybe a few hours.”

And oh how he overestimated the structural integrity of the universe.

He felt numb. (Isn’t that an oxymoron? Feeling numb? Feeling the absence of feeling? Bellamy didn’t question it. He was used to feeling absence. He felt absence acutely every day). He didn’t say a word as he stoically followed the kid to the infirmary where Clarke’s body was laid out on a table and her mother stood over it with a cold, clinical expression, her "I'm a doctor and this doesn't bother me" attitude utterly betrayed by the rivers of tears streaming down her face and cutting a path of grief through the dirt on her cheeks. He froze in the doorway, unable to come any closer.

It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. There was no way. No. None. Not her not her not her can’t be no no no no she’d just left temporarily she was coming back she was always coming back she was always going to come back she couldn’t not come back he needed her he couldn’t do this without her he couldn’t be himself without her he couldn’t he couldn’t three (impossible) months one (unbearable) week five (relentless) days twentyish (interminable) hours was already too much how was he supposed to keep going without her how was he supposed to make it to three-months-one-week-six-days-two-weeks-four-months-one-year-forever forever forever how the hell could he go on forever without her just a minute without her was so hard just so fucking hard how on earth could he do forever?

No way was she dead. It simply couldn’t be. The bloated, reeking carcass lying prone and slightly mutilated on the table couldn’t be her. Nothing that hideous could be his lovely princess, nothing that silent could be his gregarious co-leader, nothing that dead could be his lively Clarke. No.

“...looks like a panther attack.” Bellamy could hear the words but it took him ages to process them. His brain was still stuck on Clarke being dead. “It’s just my guess but I think she was headed back here, which is why she was so close to camp when she....”

And somehow that was the breaking point. Somehow that little fact, that tiny assumption, was what made Bellamy’s strange fugue of numb catatonia fall away and set him staggering sideways, barely catching himself on the doorframe and choking out a hoarse, gritted-teeth sob.

She was coming back.

He'd known she was coming back.

It would have been an hour maybe.

Maybe she would have been back already.

If not for the damn animal.

Three months one week five days and twentyish hours.

He could have had her back.

But.

And now they would bury her and mourn her and say they wouldn’t forget her, but because it was Clarke it would be true. Nobody could forget her. Nobody would. Bellamy wouldn’t. As long as he lived, Clarke would live in some small way. Maybe someday that thought would give him comfort, but at that moment, barely keeping his legs underneath him as he stared, weeping, at Clarke’s corpse, all he could feel was the roaring pain of her loss.

He felt absence. He felt it acutely.

 

* * *

 

_If I should live another day_

_I pray the Lord to guide my way_

The days passed. They became weeks and months and years. Many of the youth still looked to Bellamy as a leader, and gradually, as he learned to live around his grief (which seemed as though it would never begin to go away, and he didn’t really want it to), he worked his way back into the position. He never visited her grave. He couldn’t do it. He knew that if he went there, knowing that she was so, so close, just a few feet of earth away, he would never be able to leave.

He missed her horrendously. He missed her like nothing he’d ever felt before. Every silent moment was a moment he wished her voice would fill. Every long day was one he wished to pass by her side. Every lonely night was a night he wished he could have shared with her (if only if only if only he’d had the courage when she was alive to share a night with her just a night just one as chaste as you please just to have a memory to hold onto, just to have something). (Maybe it was better, then, to have nothing. Missing something in the abstract, never having experienced it, is vastly different than missing something concrete, something he knew he’d never have again). (But did that make it easier?) (Was there an easier?) (Everything was just so hard). (Living without her was just so damn hard).

Every time he had to make a hard decision, or an easy one, or any decision at all, he always considered what she would have done. Usually it was just the opposite of what he would have done. It didn’t comfort him- in fact, it felt wrong. It felt like he was violating her memory to assume that he could predict what she would have thought or said or done in a situation. He hated doing it, he felt like every time he tried to adopt her thoughts he was losing more and more of the real Clarke and making her into something else, a warped idealized memory-version that wasn’t true. But he did it anyway. Real or imagined or subconscious or whatever, he couldn’t fathom living without Clarke’s guidance.

If he was being honest, he wished often that he could trade places with her. She was a better leader. She was more diplomatic, more levelheaded, less singleminded when it came to protecting those she loved. He could never have made some of the greater-good decisions she had. He worried every day that he would one day have to choose, alone, between his sister and a whole village or society. He worried that he would make the wrong choice. It had been easy- no, not easy, but bearable- at Mount Weather, to kill all those people, because Clarke did it with him. Clarke was a better person than him, so it made it easier for him to live with the decision, knowing that a better person would have made it too.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have the same comfort of knowing that someone good agreed with her decision. Which was why she’d fled, unable to handle knowing the cost of the lives of the people around her.

Maybe if he’d been a better man, she would have stayed.

Maybe if he’d been a better man, she would still be alive.

Maybe if he’d been a better man, he wouldn’t be so fucking alone.

 

* * *

 

_Guide me through the starry night_

_Wake me when the sun shines bright_

 

After Clarke’s funeral, Bellamy started having a nightmare. Just one, always more or less the same. He’d have it usually once a week or so, more if he was stressed out or really missing her, less if it was a good time and he was beginning to think that maybe he’d be able to live with the gaping hole in his heart.

In the dream, he’s in the woods with the hunting party, and they come upon a clearing probably ten yards across. He pauses at the edge of the woods and scans the treeline in the rest of the clearing, when he sees her. His eyes freeze and hold on her, whole and beautiful directly opposite him in the trees. A smile breaks out on her face and he can feel himself shouting and laughing, and then they’re running towards each other.

The next part is where the dream varies. Sometimes it happens when they’re still far away from each other. Other times he’s so close he can touch the fur on the beast’s haunches with the outstretched hand meant for Clarke. But always, before he gets to her, the panther comes bounding out of the woods and snatches her up, skidding to a stop just inside the edge of the clearing and turning to lock its soulless eyes on Bellamy.

Bellamy is silent in the dream, too shocked to move or speak or even breathe, as his eyes meet Clarke’s. Hers are full of shock and pain, and she mouths the words, “Help me,” as he watches. Then the beast shakes her savagely, something snaps loudly, and when she is still again he can see that the life has gone out of her eyes. Seemingly satisfied, the cat tosses her body back at Bellamy and stalks away into the trees.

The body that lands in front of him, however, is never the dead-yet-still-Clarke ragdoll the cat had mere seconds previous. Instead it’s the ugly, misshapen thing, bearing only a passing resemblance to his princess, that lay on the infirmary table the day he last saw her. He falls to his knees and his hands go to her face as he weeps. He never remembers what he says.

(“Clarke, no” “Breathe Clarke please” “You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay, we’ll get you home and you’ll be okay” “Princess? Princess?” “Stay with me stay with me stay with me” “No no no Clarke no” “Look at me princess look at me please” “I’m sorry princess I’m so sorry I’m so so sorry” “Please princess” “I love you” “Clarke I love you” “I love you princess” “I love you” “I love you” “I love you”)

(“Don’t leave me”)

As his hands touch her face though, it starts to fall apart. Flesh sloughs off underneath his fingers and his voice trails off into screams and howls of horrified grieving rage as her face disappears. He tries to hold it together, keep all of it there, but every touch makes more of it come off, and before long he’s left with shaking fingers stroking dry bone. Then a sigh of wind comes and she starts to blow away and he throws himself down on top of her to keep her there but he never falls onto her body he always hits the empty ground and wakes up, screaming, with tears streaming down his face and cold sweat soaking his body.

As miserable as the dream was, somewhere deep in his heart, he was always grateful for it, because it meant he could see Clarke.

His dreaming mind remembered her better than his waking one.

He hated that.

 

* * *

 

_Angels watch me through the night_

_And wake me with the morning light_

It was the dead of winter.

He woke from the nightmare as he had so many times before- this time it had been a close one, the coarse hairs of the panthers pelt whispering across his fingertips as Clarke was torn from him. He felt sick.

Bellamy emerged from his cabin (built when the tents were lost to a storm) (they weathered winter better) (he built his small and spartan with his own two hands just a bed and a table four walls and a door and two windows with thick scrap-metal shutters because god only knows they can’t get any glass) (the whole time he built it he kept accidentally building in his mind a different cabin, one suited for two people, with more windows because she deserved the light, with everything of comfort and home his lacked, everything he would have wanted to give to Clarke had she not-) (the beauty of her being gone was that he could maintain his hope and his desire for a future with her indefinitely, never to fear rejection or disappointment).

It was so, so cold, and he reveled in the sting of the chill on his skin. He crunched through the snow, without even a coat, intending to just step outside the camp walls for a moment, stare out into the woods, then return to bed.

He intended.

When he closed the tiny gate behind him, he made the split second decision to walk into the woods a ways, see what the trees were like under the heavy blanket of snow. He walked and marveled silently, daring hardly to breathe lest he disturb the hushed stillness of the world under new snow. Then he saw it- blonde hair, just a flash, through the trees off to the side. Without a second thought he turned and started walking towards it, slightly faster.

The silence cracked briefly and he would swear on his heart he heard a laugh. Her laugh. Unmistakeable. He broke into a run. A flash of blonde here, a giggle there, he chased her through the woods. His feet flew through the snow, tripping and stumbling and heedless utterly of everything in his way. The ground didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing but her.

He tripped and fell down a shallow embankment to a creek, deep enough to cover him completely. The ice on top wasn’t thick enough to hold him and he went crashing through and then he was so overcome with cold he couldn’t breathe and then he was gasping desperately for air, just managing to get his head above water, and then as he looked up her face appeared over the ridge of the bank.

It was her face, really her face. The living one he’d been longing to see since that day so long ago when she left Camp Jaha. He stared and stared, drinking her in like a man dying of thirst. She smiled down at him and he was breathless again, like he’d been plunged in another frozen creek, but a different, pleasant breathlessness. She beckoned him and then took off, and he scrambled up the bank after her.

The cold and his wet clothes slowed him down, but she seemed to be slowing down as well. They must have traveled a mile through those woods in the cold, most of it running. Finally she stopped, and he approached her slowly, as if she were a skittish animal.

“Come on, Bellamy,” she said softly, “I don’t bite.”

He could have cried just for hearing her voice.

He closed the distance between them and reached out hesitantly to cup her cheek.

“I’ve missed you so much, princess.” His voice was hoarse and thick with years of pain boxed up and stored away in the part of his heart she used to occupy.

“I’ve missed you too, Bellamy.”

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest.

“I never got to tell you- before you- I never got to say I love you,” he murmured into her hair.

“It’s okay,” she replied, pressing her face into his collarbone. “I know.”

“Did you know then?” It’s imperative to him, suddenly, that she have died knowing how ardently he loved her.

“I knew. I never would have said it out loud, but I knew.”

A tear slipped down his cheek. He blinked and suddenly he was on his knees, still holding her. He blinked again and they were on the ground, lying side by side, holding each other, legs tangled together.

“I’m sorry, princess.”

“Don’t be, none of it was your fault.”

“Still.”

“I love you.”

(she loved him. He didn’t believe it. It was true)

“I’m not a good person.”

“You did your best.”

“Is that enough?”

“It has to be.”

(he was no longer aware of the snow or the night, only her)

“Don’t leave me, princess. Please don’t leave me again.”

“I won’t.”

“I’m so tired.”

“Close your eyes.”

“I want to see you.”

“I’ll be here when you wake, Bellamy.”

(he was warm, warmer than he’d been in weeks, warm as the summer sun or the light of Clarke’s love)

She began to hum

(He recognized the tune)

(His mind was slow with sleep)

(Somewhere he remembered the name Atom)

He held her closer

She kept humming

(Everything was fading)

(Everything but her)

(There was nothing but her)

She kept humming

 

* * *

 

_If I should die before I wake,_

_I pray the Lord my soul to take_

They found his body a day later.

It was in the same place Clarke had died.

They wanted to be overcome with grief but they all knew how much pain he’d been in.

When they found him he was smiling serenely, his face happier and more peaceful than any of them had ever seen it, or at least that they could remember.

He was frozen in the snow, stiff and petrified with his arms streched out as if he were holding someone.

They wanted to grieve.

But he was at peace.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry you guys it just came to me I had to do it.  
> Thank you for reading!


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